As if mobile phone call reception wasn’t enough of a perception problem for AT&T, along comes the “issue” of data limits. The company just tossed out the “unlimited” data plan (although it wasn’t truly unlimited), and instituted plans to recognize what is really happening in the smartphone market. And that is, most of us are using just a moderate amount of data, and a few are using lots more data. I can tell you that my AT&T data use with an iPhone is very consistently 50 Mb a month (although one months was around 125 Mb). So the new AT&T 2 Gb data plan limit wouldn’t be a problem. Naturally, the new iPhone OS 4.0 tethering feature might change that. But for now, a 2 Gb limit wouldn’t bother me at all. I was worried when signing up for Comcast Internet service that their 250 Gb limit might be too little. Again, as it turns out, it’s not a problem. Comcast just implemented an on-line way to check your monthly data use, and it says I’m consistently using 20 Gb a month. That includes 2-3 of Apple TV movies a month, lots of browsing and moderate Web video watching by my family. Obviously, I still have plenty of data left to download. Those who hear the word “limit” and who are immediately fearful should relax. It’s not limiting. [And read this discussion of how much video you can watch for 2 Gb.]

Quite simply, Apple stores are not located among all the top European business cities. Real estate company Cushman & Wakefield’s European office posted its 2009 survey of European business leaders, and found that London, Paris and Frankfurt were the top three, a position they’ve held for the past 10 years. According to respondents, the most important factors when deciding where to do business was easy access to markets, customers and clients, quality of staff, quality of telecom and transport links. Beyond the top three, here are the next seven, with only one having an Apple store:

• Barcelona
• Brussels
• Madrid
• Munich – yes
• Amsterdam
• Berlin
• Milan

Of the total 34 cities listed, just 13 cities have an Apple store. However, at least three of the cities have stores planned in the next year. Interestingly, when asked about global expansion, respondents pointed mostly to Asia, with countries including China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Egypt and Hong Kong. Download (pdf) the report to see more details.

If you want to get a glimpse of “clever,” buy the $2.99 iPhone app called Sun Seeker. Nice. You fire up the app, and it will determine your location and the local time. Then it will calculate and display all sorts of sun-related information, including sunrise, sunset, time of highest point, etc. It will display an interesting, flat depiction of the sun’s path over your location for any date and time. But the really “Wow!” feature uses the iPhone’s camera. You select “3D” from the menu and the camera goes live, criss-crossed by colored lines indicating where the sun will be (or is) in real time—even as you tilt and pan the iPhone. It’s just amazing to watch the lines move and the predicted sun positions change. Take it outside and stand near a tree, and see how the sun’s path will put you in shadow or not. How can it possibly know where you’re pointing the iPhone? It’s all about accelerometers or something. Whatever the tech, it’s a very useful tool for photographers, architects or anyone who wants to know about shadows and sun position. For $2.99, it’s interesting for anyone.

BusinessWeek reports that Wal-Mart expects to obtain permission to sell the iPad by the end of this year. Now how bad is that idea? Steve Jobs began the company’s retail initiative nine years next week specifically because no one else was providing the sales expertise necessary to explain the features of Apple’s products. Do they just want to box up the iPads and put them behind locked glass, and have a sales person unlock it if you’re interested? What is the advantage of selling through Wal-Mart compared to selling on-line? It’s not equal—it’s less effective for Wal-Mart. Read what a Sr. VP for Wal-Mart feels about the iPad sales possibility here.

This is why selling at Wal-Mart is a bad idea—complete disrespect for Apple's products, in this case the iPhone 3GS. There are no display models, the display is blocked, and behind this counter an employee was trimming his fingernails with a knife.

Back in 2004 Steve Jobs participated in a one-hour talk with Walt Mossberg at the annual All Things Digital conference. Now Walt’s colleague and conference co-producer Kara Swisher has re-posted video of the talk, which shows Jobs’ amazing grasp of consumers and technology. The talk was mid-iPod, but pre-iPhone, Apple TV and iPad. Yet, Jobs talked about cellular phones, PDAs and tablets, noting that up to 2004 the consumer had not really found them compelling. At 13 minutes he discusses the origin of the retail stores, including how Best Buy and similar stores couldn’t provide enough sales expertise for Apple’s products. He explained how the digital music revolution began and defended certain pricing and DRM efforts. At the very end of the video an audience member asked about iTunes and video, prompting Jobs to launch into an energetic five-minute explanation of the difference between how music and video is consumed—truly amazing! Watching the video is like watching history played backwards. Check it out here.

In case you didn’t get the message when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad from a cozy chair, now Apple is posting outdoor billboards to remind you—it’s intended for consumption of content in a casual setting, usually with the iPad sitting on your legs. The San Francisco area is littered with the billboards, one showing a side view of a woman’s bent legs, and two hands holding an iPad. Another version shows a man’s legs in bluejeans resting the iPad on his legs. In both views, the iPad is nearly invisible, putting the emphasis on the use of the iPad, not its form.

If you read the announcement message from Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein to the company’s employees, you might mistakenly believe that enormously successful Palm was merging with Hewlett-Packard, forming a powerhouse combination of technology expertise. “Today,” Rubenstein said, “we are taking a huge step forward in accelerating (our) strategy with the announcement of a merger with HP.” But oddly, Rubenstein didn’t mention “purchase” or buy-out or anything like it to his employees. Instead, it described the $1.2 billion deal as a “merger” and that operations with H-P will have to be “integrated.” As for the Palm’s success, Rubenstein was ebullient: “In a very short period of time, we’ve amassed a world-class team, brought webOS to market with widespread acclaim, launched four new devices and launched in eight countries. In short, we have delivered on our original plan.” Well, if the plan was few sales and and nearly no revenue, mission accomplished! How can someone so smart be so blind to the realities of tech? It’s not enough to have a great hardware and impressive software. You have to convince lots of other people that it’s so. In Palm’s case, no one is excited about its products. Now, what will happen after H-P’s purchase of Palm? Charitably speaking, H-P hasn’t been exactly  a rocket to which acquisitions have been strapped so they could soar to greater heights. Remember Compaq? 3Com? EDS? They were just absorbed and disappeared into the large, grinding, anonymous operation that is H-P. And now it’s Palm’s turn. P.S.— It turns out that former Palm CEO Todd Bradley (2003-2005) now works at HP, where he’s chief of the PC division, under which Palm operations will reside. So the exec who failed Palm previously will get another shot at it.

You may have heard that a San Francisco area woman has sued Apple in federal court over the company’s use of liquid immersion indicators (LII) to determine the condition of iPhones and iPods when determining warranty service. The lawsuit (pdf) has been reported with about 20 different slants, primarily by writers who didn’t read the lawsuit, or closely enough. The lawsuit doesn’t dispute the warranty coverage conditions, or Apple’s right to refuse coverage to water-damaged devices. In fact, the lawsuit literally states that in the lawsuit. What the lawsuit claims is that the LII technology is faulty. In the vernacular of lawsuits, it states that, “The plaintiff is informed and believes…” that other types of moisture can trigger the LII, including cold weather and ordinary humidity. The lawsuit also says there are internal LII that would help confirm liquid exposure, but that the Genius Bar staff only check those upon disassembly of the device “only in rare circumstances.” And lastly, if a Genius does disassemble the device, they won’t let owner see the internal LII, take photos of them nor will share any images they take with the customer. The lawsuit also takes issue with the out-of-warrant, $199 damaged phone replacement policy, which requires the owner to relinquish the damaged phone “without being compensate for it.” The lawsuit sets out the plaintiff’s bad luck with two malfunctioning phones, which both displayed activated LII when she took them to the Corte Madera store. She bought two replacement phones, believed something wasn’t right about the LII and replacement policies, and now here we are in court. The key, of course, is the technical question—do the LII work correctly or not? I assume that the plaintiff’s lawyers are prepared to prove they aren’t.

The long and involved story of an iPhone prototype lost or stolen from a California bar has been an enormous news item among the blogs. After an Apple employee left it behind on a bar stool, the finder turned it over to Gizmodo.com, reportedly for $5,000. The handset was taken apart, probed, photographed and video’d, as if it were some type of alien artifact. In fact, leaks from Apple over the past few months have let most the gas out of this story. We all knew the phone would have a front-facing camera. The replaceable battery and other features are pretty well known. The squared-off design is certainly a little odd, but then maybe it’s just one of many possible designs. The bottom line is that Apple has reaped an enormous amount of publicity over the incident, while competitors have gleaned almost nothing they didn’t already know about the future iPhone. At the same time, anyone who was considering a smartphone purchase has just postponed it, attracted by the new (and certain) features of the leaked model. The blogs are making this out to the be security breach of the century only to bolster their own stories. What materially was damaged here? Nothing. So, if I were Steve, I’d give the employee a couple of weeks off without pay, be happy that the incident has primed the frenzy over the June-July introduction of the new iPhone model, and then push on. It’s a great story, but doesn’t really affect Apple negatively.

You might wonder why all of a sudden television manufacturers are pushing down hard on the accelerator of 3-D TV. Never heard about home 3-D TV before, never wanted it. You may also have recently heard about mobile TV. Broadcasters have banded together in a huge initiative to gain spectrum for sending you “Wheel of Fortune” over the airwaves to a mobile device, maybe your smartphone. In this case, I have heard of it before, and it’s never gained an traction. So why are these two technologies suddenly hot? It’s because TV has run out of gas for its existing technology, and they’re trying to convince consumers that they need something new: 3-D and mobile. But consumers have a way of telling companies what they want, not the other way around. In the case of 3-D, exactly how much broadcasting in an ordinary day would be even interesting in 3-D, let alone amazing? Not much. And don’t tell me that buying $250 pairs of glasses for the entire family is going to become “routine” for watching on a double-the-price TV. It won’t. And mobile TV has never been popular for some reason—maybe people remember the awful little battery-powered TVs that delivered a terrible signal of the 1980s. Or maybe downloadable content is really how people want to handle video content. My impression is the broadcasters simply want to fend off the FCC from reallocating a huge block of inefficiently-used (or unused) spectrum assigned to broadcast TV. They don’t want to create a “Wow!” product. The companies that know what consumers really want are the ones that best succeed.

In a stunning reversal of policy, and one that has vast implications for the future, Apple authorized at least 12 authorized resellers in California to sell the iPad on its debut Saturday. Previously, not only have resellers not received stocks of new products on the first day of availability, but they haven’t been allowed to the iPhone at all. The policy change is especially ironic in the face of a 7-year lawsuit by a San Jose-based reseller who has accused Apple of withholding products, failing to pay for warranty repairs and a long list of other illegal business practices. It’s not known if resellers in other states were allowed to sign up for iPad sales. But in a story on the Santa Barbara News Network Web site, the owner of Mac Mechanic in Santa Barbara said he signed a non-disclosure agreement to sell the 25 iPads that customers bought over two days. Mike Bishop said the iPads were “selling like hotcakes.” Irony #2—most Best Buy stores received only 15 iPads, according to reports. Apple’s reasoning for withholding iPhones from resellers is the required high degree of training, knowledge and attention that resellers can give to iPhone buyers. That same degree of salesmanship apparently isn’t required for the iPad. But even so, this is a big decision, which could lead to…well, I’m not sure. Certainly other resellers will want the same deal that Bishop received. But it could mean that other larger resellers might want to sell Apple products, hoping to jump on the success bandwagon. Remember April 3rd.

The iPad is available, and at the same moment journalism has been tossed into the churning, turbulent ocean of possibilities. And so far, it doesn’t look good. Time Magazine has posted its “app,” and I quote the word especially to make a point. On the iTunes Store, Time doesn’t mention the word “issue,” “edition” or anything indicating a periodical. Rather, they mention “app” and say you can download the “magazine.” Traditionally, Apple has used the word “app” to indicate a application, which is a computer software program that displays information and allows for some interactivity. It doesn’t mean content. Well, actually, in the case of Time, the “app” is the issue. And it costs $4.99. In a nutshell, the magazine’s app is not an app, but rather one weekly issue of the magazine in on-line form. Second, it’s $4.99. Check the buyer comments and you’ll see that many believed the “app” was a computer program, from which they would receive weekly issues somehow. They didn’t realize they were paying $4.99 for one issue. Time and the other magazines should be attracting readers, not confusing them with wrong terminology or raising questions about buying. And the per-issue pricing is way too high, according to buyers (a new sub is $20 yearly vs. on-line of over $240). Time wants readers, right? Apparently Marvel Comics gets it. They’ve introduced a free app for the iPad, from which you can buy individual comic book editions for $1.99. Simple, correct app/issue terminology and reasonable pricing. [The irony, of course, is the Time Warner owns Marvel.] Time, WSJ, everyone else, take a look. [some actual app sales numbers here]